MIT takes over administration of Google Apps for MIT.EDU

Background

Google has maintained an instance of Google Apps for the MIT.EDU domain at http://www.google.com/a/mit.edu/. This was what Google refers to as its un-administered "Teams Edition." It allowed users with addresses at mit.edu to register to create and share Google docs and calendars. Many members of the MIT community took advantage of this Google service when others shared documents with their MIT address, and to keep documents separate from their personal Google accounts.

Google announced in early August 2012 that they would be discontinuing Teams Edition by September 4th, 2012. You may recall seeing a message from Google to that effect at the beginning of August. Read the notice from Google...

Short term changes

MIT took over responsibility for administering Google Apps for MIT.EDU on short notice (August 22nd, 2012) to keep it from being turned off and to allow currently registered users to continue to use it. It is now covered under a new Google Apps for Education agreement between MIT and Google.

We will be ramping up support for Google Apps for MIT.EDU over the next months and are beginning efforts to integrate it with MIT directory services and authentication. In the interim, you can continue to log in and use the service as you did before. The same Google services, Docs, Calendar, and Sites, are available.

While we ramp up more complete support, please feel free to contact us at:

with any questions and issues and we will do our best to assist you. Email goes to the Educational Systems support team at the Help Desk. We have also started a documentation portal on Google Apps for MIT.EDU at http://mit.edu/google/ with answers to common questions and known issues.

We apologize for the timing of this announcement, coinciding with the beginning of the academic year. It was driven by Google's timeline for Google Apps changes. Google has announced further user-visible changes to Google Apps coming in early September, and we wanted to make sure a contact address was available to you in case you have any questions.

Moving Forward

If you are a member of the MIT community and interested in keeping informed or participating in efforts to support Google Apps for Education and in planning efforts going forward, if you are currently using Google Apps in your teaching or think you might want to do so going forward, we would love to hear from you. We will be setting up announcement lists and additional outreach and ways to stay involved with with Google Apps related projects over the next few weeks.